Ever since CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping announced The Chinese Dream, shortly after his ascension to China’s highest political position in November 2012, The Chinese Dream has stirred hopes and high expectations on the one hand and has provoked questions and wonder on the other. What is clear is that The Chinese Dream has become a high-level organizing principle for President Xi’s leadership, and it is from this grand overarching vision that our conference, World Dialogue on the Chinese Dream, takes its significance.

Many at home and abroad have offered opinions on what The Chinese Dream is, or what it should be, or what it should not be. Chinese scholars and China’s Western critics may differ in their opinions—even among themselves—but they are allied in recognizing the importance of The Chinese Dream and therefore analyzing it.

I will not here suggest which elements of The Chinese Dream are more relevant than others or how its diverse facets may interact. My objective, rather, is to suggest a theoretical framework for The Chinese Dream by arraying its content or applications and organizing them into categories and subcategories. I call the results a “taxonomy,’ using as an analogy the order or structure that scientists impose on the biological world for the purpose of understanding it better.

As such, my objective is limited. I do not seek so much to explain The Chinese Dream as to provide the categories of which it is composed. This may help others to offer descriptive or prescriptive analysis in a coherent and integrated manner. I would like to see the size and scope of the landscape that The Chinese Dream covers. I would like to answer the foreign critics’ charge that The Chinese Dream is vague and sloganeering.

I would like to ground The Chinese Dream in a way of thinking that is both theoretically sound and pragmatically applicable. A framework for The Chinese Dream may facilitate a way of thinking, a methodology, to determine what follows from these categories. Though I do not claim that there is anything special about the specific taxonomy I present, I do suggest that the process of developing a taxonomy, irrespective of its specific structure, can help elucidate The Chinese Dream.

In the taxonomy I propose, I have five high-level categories with which to describe and analyze The Chinese Dream: national, personal, historical, global and antithetical. For each I suggest subcategories. Then I show how the remarkable Third Plenary of the 18th CPC Central Committee reinforces The Chinese Dream.